Gerald Ford

Gerald Rudolph Ford, an accidental president of the United States, died on December 26th, aged 93

THERE were many times in his long life when Gerald Ford felt he had reached the top of the tree. The moment when, puffing out his teenage chest, he was made an Eagle Scout after earning 21 badges (Cooking, Camping, Civics, Lifesaving, Bird Study, First Aid). The afternoon when, his big bland face still running with sweat under his leather cap, he was named most valuable player for Michigan against Minnesota in the 1934 football season. The day in 1948 when he beat Bartel Jonkman, darling of the powerful Dutch Calvinist community, to win the Republican primary for the Grand Rapids congressional seat by nearly 10,000 votes; and the morning when, wearing one black shoe and one brown one, he walked down the aisle with Betty Warren, the prettiest single woman in the city.

The moment he became vice-president of the United States felt somewhat less portentous. Spiro Agnew had resigned in October 1973 after charges of tax evasion; the leaders of Congress had picked Mr Ford to succeed him. There was a telephone call. Mr Ford, after 13 terms as a congressman, had risen to become a popular minority leader in the House, with no ambitions but to be speaker one day if control swung back to the Republicans. Still, as he told Betty, the vice-presidency would make a “nice conclusion” to his career.

It was not the conclusion. The moment he reached the top came on August 9th 1974, when Richard Nixon, worn down by the Watergate scandal, resigned the presidency. Mr Ford, like the rest of America, watched the broadcast on television. Then he went to bed. “My feeling is you might as well get to sleep,” he said later. After becoming the first unelected vice-president, he was now the first unelected president of the United States. He snored happily on.

Mr Ford disliked fuss. His philosophy was to put his head down, work “like hell” and not fret about what might have been. His straightness and squareness made him the antithesis of the wriggling, tormented man he replaced. As he made his inaugural speech in the East Room of the White House—“just a little straight talk among friends”—the very flatness of his Michigan vowels, his stumbles over words, his mistiness whenever he talked about prayers, seemed like a gale of fresh air.

But straightness could also be disconcerting. Americans found that out when, after a month in office, Mr Ford gave Nixon a “full, free and absolute” pardon for anything he might have done while president. All inquiries, charges, rootings through the evidence, rehashings of the past were short-circuited; America would move on. The president's hordes of critics suspected a deal had been done, and certainly one had been floated by Nixon's chief of staff, Alexander Haig. But Mr Ford had not agreed to it. He had pardoned Nixon—as his speech at the time made clear, and as remarks made public after his death confirmed—both to calm things down, and because he was his friend. Buddies should stick by each other.

On time for dinner

For an average congressman thrust accidentally into power, Mr Ford made a fairly good fist of things. Forces beyond his control helped somewhat. The galloping inflation he inherited was cooled by a mild recession; sky-high energy prices fell gradually of their own accord; Vietnam was definitively lost to the Vietcong, and the last American troops had no option but to leave. The post-Watergate Congress swarmed with cocky, virtuous Democrats, but Mr Ford, an instinctive fiscal conservative, managed to veto most of the spending bills he disliked. He also refused—with a certain pleasure, it seemed at the time—to bail out the bankrupt Democratic city of New York.

He felt proud, looking back, of what he had done to bind up his damaged country. Under him, Nixon's besieged White House became a relaxed and open place, in which a large loping golden retriever shadowed the large loping president, and the powers assumed by the executive branch began to be scaled back again. America, still outraged by the pardon, did not thank him, ejecting him in 1976 in favour of a Georgia peanut farmer. That hurt; for all his diffidence in coming to the job, Mr Ford had grown to like the life of a president, and so had Betty. But he “wasn't going to sit and cry about it”. He would smoke his pipe, write his memoirs, and play golf with Bob Hope.

The curious wondered what made him so very assured in the top job; for, despite all his tumblings on the ski-slopes or down the steps of Air Force One, assured he was. Mr Ford gave pious credit to his mother, who had made him recite Kipling's “If” whenever he got in a temper, and whose rule-of-the-house had been “Tell the truth, work hard, and come to dinner on time.” Cod psychologists noted that Mr Ford revered his paint-seller stepfather and had a soft spot for another Midwestern retailer, Harry Truman; both, perhaps, had inspired him to be decent, conciliatory and industrious.

He himself, in retirement, was still surprised at what he had done. Oddly, he remarked, he had never felt “more secure, more certain of myself”, than when he was in the White House, at the top of the tree. Some might say that he had never had enough imagination to be scared.